Celebrating the Body Beautiful

Have you ever seen an actor who looked exactly like you? A supermodel whose portfolio could easily be your own personal photo album? Probably not.

Yet if you were to believe the media, you would think human bodies are as limited as lattes: tall, low-fat and tan.

The Erotic Museum in Hollywood, California, aims to change all that. As part of its mission — "to provide the community with a positive image of the potential of human sexuality" — it has launched the Human Body Project, with the ambitious goal of chronicling what human beings really look like, in all our natural and unnatural permutations.

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"In a museum, you can sometimes just present an interesting-looking thing and leave people to look and draw their own conclusions," says curator Eric Singley. In this case, the interesting-looking thing is a collection of photographs of people with their clothes on and off, from various angles, shot against a plain background in a small studio at the back of the museum.

Big and small, female and male, transgendered and intergendered, tattooed and plain, the range of humanity represented in the exhibit offers a much more complex — and real — picture of who we are as a species and as sexual beings than you'll find in advertising and blockbuster movies.

Eric arranges the pictures so they inspire us to recognize, and to question, our initial assumptions about gender, sexuality and power. Rows of images juxtapose sex, body type, age, race and body art. Each photo features the subject's entire body, shot from front or back or side. Not all of the pictures are shot to the same scale, allowing for intriguing considerations of size and perspective.

And because most subjects appear both nude and clothed, you find that your opinions about who they are change depending on which picture you saw first.

"People get mesmerized, staring for a long time," Eric says. "We have a lot of photos so you can make a lot of different comparisons."

The longer I looked, the more I saw. A nude woman standing with her feet apart and shoulders squared catches the eye, because it's an assertive stance we traditionally associate with men. A thin naked man, who Eric tells me is a husband and father of two, also appears in another row, looking natty in a vintage dress and platform sandals with a matching handbag.

One woman, curvy and statuesque in her nude shot, looks dumpy in an oversized T-shirt tucked into baggy cargo pants. Naked, she's as feminine and sexy as a woman can be. Clothed, she downplays breasts and hips and hides her waist. Eric muses that she deliberately uses clothing to neutralize her gender; I think she just thinks she's fat and hasn't watched What Not to Wear.

A Harley rider who hangs out across the street from the museum stands in profile, looking almost as tough in his nudity as he does in leathers. Yet, in another picture, where he's facing a woman about his size and age, his presence morphs from intimidating to regular middle-aged guy with a belly. Why does my perception of him change when I see him as part of a couple?

A beautiful blonde woman dressed in tight jeans and a midriff-baring top stands with her hip jutting provocatively to one side, emphasizing her curves. When I found her again among the nudes, standing up straight, I discovered she has a penis. Yet I still categorized her as more female than male.

Was that because I first saw her as a clothed woman? Was it due to how she carries her body, the expression on her face, the way she styles her hair? Or my instinctive assumption that a biologically male person who gets breast implants identifies more as female than male?

Those are the kinds of questions the project seeks to raise, if not answer.

A digital camera and a database make the project possible, not just in keeping costs down but in managing the collection. The museum complies with 18 USC 2257 and maintains meticulous records of the subjects' ages and identities.

Eric admits his current dataset is not as rich as he'd like it to be. "I want old black people, young Polynesian people, a thousand different kinds of people," he says. "Right now it seems like the majority who respond are white folks in the 20 to 40 age bracket."

When he's ready to do a shoot, he puts a notice on the museum's website inviting people to participate. Many of the volunteers are tourists, or vacationers who planned their trips to Hollywood around the opportunity to be photographed "and get free admission to the museum," Eric says.

Eric has also experimented with the collection, creating composite images that may or may not make it into the official exhibit. "People respond psychologically at a rude level when they see sexuality challenged like that," he says. "(The composites) have a bit of a sideshow look to them and might be too gimmicky."

And yet they seem a natural extension of the project's goal of showing humanity in its full spectrum while blasting through our preconceptions about gender and sexuality. For now, they are displayed on the website.

The exhibit also includes video from Beautiful Agony — well, it will as soon as the hardware is in place. The videos, shot by the subjects themselves, show the heads and shoulders of individuals masturbating. "It's hardcore without nudity," says site co-founder Richard Lawrence. "A real face having a real orgasm — it's the opposite of porn."

"These two projects are in a similar spirit," Eric says. "Beautiful Agony is showing us as we are, rather than as we see each other. You see the emotional transformation that takes place and comes to a resolution in a way you don't get to see when you're with someone else, or watching a film. It's another way to look at people behaving more naturally."

The current exhibit is only a preview of what's to come. Eventually, the project will become more interactive, with questions you can answer, and the ability to see how others respond. Comparing assumptions can unveil stereotypes you might not even realize you adhere to.

"One of our goals is to compare what we think we know about each other with what the reality is," says Eric.

See you next Friday,

Regina Lynn

Regina Lynn doesn't have any nudity on her website. However, you can go there to join the Sex Drive forum, or send her an e-mail at ginalynn@gmail.com.

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